Project Selection Lecture Notes
What makes a good project?
The project allows you to demonstrate your skills and explore a topic in-depth: Project Proposals.
The work must be the student's own, supported by cited material and consequently its copyright is owned by the student. Sometimes, e.g. for industry projects, separate agreements and conditions may apply; discuss with the supervisor as needed.
See the PATS archive for examples of good (not perfect) past projects students have allowed us to publish.
Solve a Problem
Anything that is related to your degree scheme (specialisms).
Something that you can do with the material learned in the course.
Specialised in some area; necessarily means you need to learn more and may not know everything yet.
Components
Background and context of the problem with a detailed problem specification.
Methodology or approach of how the problem is solved.
Evaluation of the solution.
A complete solution is often not required, and positive and negative evaluations are both useful, depending on your problem. Discuss the expectations for a particular proposal with your supervisor.
Deliverables
Student Proposals
Feasibility
Special resources, e.g. non-standard hardware, special software.
Ethical approval, affecting any project involving human participants, human material or human data (Human Research).
Legal issues, especially intellectual property and licensing.
See Feasibility - this is the student's and supervisor's responsibility and part of the risk management.
Management
The student is responsible to manage and execute the project.
The supervisor supports and advises as needed, provides feed-forward, and is one the examiners.
Regular meetings with supervisor during spring term weeks (about 30 minutes on average per term week).
Assessment
Supervisor and moderator mark your deliverables independently and then agree on a mark for the exam board, to be checked by an external examiner.
High 1st: solution completed to high standards and explored deeply; often evaluation, but also your own ideas/methodologies/code; usually goes beyond expectations.
1st: solution explored deeper; completed to high-level standards; fulfilling all expectations completely.
2.1: standard solution, well within expectations, executed well.
2.2: some problems, but solid core of a solution within expectations.
3rd: major problems with the solution, not meeting expectations, but it still demonstrates good skills and knowledge in the degree scheme area.
Fail: solution has severe problems; inappropriate approach; hardly any suitable work or results.
See marking criteria of the deliverables.
Discuss details and expectations of specific proposals with supervisor.
Project Selection
Express interest in staff proposals /
find a supervisor for your proposal via
PATS.
Arrange meeting with supervisor to
discuss.
Can meet with more supervisors and agree later on, but meeting is essential.
Agreement is on first come, first served basis and exactly the same project can only be executed once.
Clearly
agree supervision with a supervisor; they will set up your project on
PATS.